


i experimented with a weird magic device and all i got was this trauma

by contrequirose



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Captivity, F/M, Implied/Referenced Torture, Mental Instability, Yeza's had a rough time, kind of inspired off a tumblr post, man, musings about how linguistics work in resurrection situations, spoilers for episodes 48-50 oof, yeza is cool and a good dad and a good alchemist and is also very good at swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 15:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17790227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/contrequirose/pseuds/contrequirose
Summary: Yeza has been kidnapped by goblins, told his wife was dead, been forced to experiment with a weird magic thing, gotten kidnapped by Xorhasians, and is now hearing a voice with an accent he's never heard before telling him his wife is alive.It's been a bad year.





	i experimented with a weird magic device and all i got was this trauma

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in thirty eight minutes.  
> i have Emotions.

He is one hundred percent absolutely losing it.

Which – it sucks! It’s not a good thing!

But there isn’t really. Anything he can do, right now, in this room that is so fucking dark, damn, he can understand that drow have darkvision but do they not know that halflings don’t? What’s up with that, huh. That’s – speciesist, is what that is.

Just because he’s a prisoner, and he hasn’t really gotten anyone willing to talk to him in Common to explain that, oh, no, I wasn’t one of the people responsible for stealing the fucking weird cube thing, no, that’s the mages that weren’t even at the house where you found me because they teleported the instant they felt the earth shake, not me, now can I have a lamp, just maybe?

He’s not sure how much luck he would have with explaining, to be honest.

But.

Anyways.

It’s real dark in here. And, also, there isn’t a real bed? They keep feeding him and giving him water, and it’s not even horrible food, just normal road rations, but they couldn’t give him a bed?

It’s just a pile of rough blankets.

Which – now that he’s thinking about it, dark elves probably don’t sleep. So no beds?

That – that sucks. They live in the dark, and they don’t even have beds.

They also kidnapped him! So, really, how sad can he be.

It’s been a horrible year. He’s earned that modifier at this point. Capital H Horrible.

…

He has no fucking clue what’s going on.

And, hey, cherry on top of the cake, all the letters he’s been receiving from who he had assumed to be one of Veth’s _fucking_ brothers (don’t deserve that name, even, he hates them so much, bunch of assholes who showed up to her funeral and drank ale in the back the whole time, fucking-) with buttons and money and letters that were so close to her handwriting that he had sobbed and gotten tear stains on the paper – either he’s insane, and hallucinating a weird ass accented voice in his head claiming that his wife is alive, and those letters are from someone pretending to be a dead woman for jokes, or – or he’s not insane, and his wife is alive, and she is coming to get him.

He is so, so sure that he’s lost it.

He wants to be wrong.

If he’s wrong – then it means that Veth – gods, but they found her body, this doesn’t make sense –

Maybe it’s time to just, accept the fact that he’s been in darkness for weeks, now, and these people haven’t hurt him but it hasn’t been spring time flowers, either, and that’s – he was kidnapped, and before that he was forced to work with that shitty weird cube thing (there’s probably a name for it that he just. Doesn’t know. He’s never been too hot at geometry.) and work his hand to the bone to produce that cloudy stuff, and those mages were threatening his son and weren’t too kind to him, no sir, they were decidedly looser with pain and punishment then the people who kidnapped him, and what does that say about the Empire’s political system, huh.

That got away from him, a little bit.

He’s – he’s going to go ahead and say that he has a right to lose it, a little bit, maybe.

Just a little bit.

Hearing voices might be a touch more than a little bit.

But, hey, could be real.

(he hopes its real.)

Right, what was he –

Oh. Food. Right.

He can’t fucking see the food, which turns eating into a fun guessing game of what is this mushy thing, is it peas? Is it turnips? Is it carrots? Who knows?

It’s the same as all the other times, though, hard bread and sausages and normal ration stuff. No mushy things. Probably for the best, that.

Some watered down ale, in a stone (might be clay. Probably is clay, now that he thinks about it, why would you bother to make something out of stone) mug.

It’s some shitty ale, to be perfectly honest. He doesn’t have a large frame of reference – they were always more wine people, him and Veth – but it tastes. Tastes bad, folks.

Everything else is ok.

He hums to himself, in the dark, after he eats.

There’s not a lot to do, they had given up trying to talk to him midway through the journey here because he really, really has no fucking clue whats going on and they mostly just shouted at him in some other language, someone had tried to talk to him in Common at one point but he had no answers to give, and was kind of out of the world terrified at that point, anyways, which didn’t help matters –

So he hums, to himself, little ditties that his parents had sung as a kid, and some of the made-up songs that Veth would do for Luke that were hilariously, hilariously bad.

He loved his wife, but she was so bad at making up the lyrics.

He loves his wife? (Tenses suck, at the best of times, he’s not a linguist, he doesn’t know if there’s a verb ending to correspond to ‘wife who was dead is now alive, what the fuck’)

He can’t think too hard about Veth being alive, and coming for him, or he’s going to scream in here, and that’s just a waste of effort, and might attract too much attention, and they haven’t killed him so far and he doesn’t really want to tempt fate.

Gods, he misses Luke.

Time is weird, when there’s no windows and no light.

Who knew.

So he falls asleep at some point, and when the door slot screeches open again and another plate of food is left on the ground, he jolts awake.

“Hey –“ his voice cracks, and he clears his throat. “Can I get a light, or something? I can’t see.”

There’s no response, which isn’t surprising but is still disappointing.

He eats his – breakfast, he guesses, though it could be two in the afternoon for all he knows.

Apparently the person who brings the food knows common, though, because when the door slot opens again, some unknowable amount of time later, and he’s patting the ground for the new tray, his fingers run into something round, and smooth, and cold to the touch.

And when he picks it up, and finds the indent on one side, and presses his thumb into it, the orb comes to life, growing warm in his hands –

And then, presumably, growing warm out of his hands, because it floats to the ceiling and weak light covers the room.

A voice he doesn’t recognize echoes from the hallway beyond the door, and he can just spot a set of black and shiny boots through the door slot.

“Sorry. We did not know about the light.”

The slot shuts, and the boot steps clank away, and he can finally, finally, see.

The mug is made out of clay. Points to Yeza.

And now that there’s light, he can see that the walls are dark grey stone, worn from age, and the blankets he was given were brown, and he has a shit ton of dirt under his nails that he promptly uses the edge of the fork he was given to get rid of.

He can also see that there is a strnagly intricate drawing of a dick in the corner of the ceiling, in something that is too dark to be blood.

Which. Weird.

But, hey, could be worse, no creepy wall messages written in blood, or torture manacles on the wall, or like, tally marks from the previous prisoner who died in the cell, spooooooky –

He’s not going to die here.

If his brain is to be trusted, someone is coming.

And if he can’t –

Well, he has a light, now.

He has a fork.

And he has the tiny pile of ingredients that he’s been piling up under the bed, that in a few months, and a lot of luck, he might be able to turn into something that goes boom.

He really doesn’t want to be here for a few months.

But if he is – if he is, he can at least try and escape.

Or die in a tiny explosion.

It would be on brand, at least.

He really hopes that Veth is coming.

There’s not much more to say, except that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
